Page 82

EIGHTEEN

Sorsha

We figured the “busy road” the fae woman had mentioned was probably the highway that cut through the city—at least, it’d better be, because otherwise we’d be down in the channels of excrement for days. As Ruse drove along it toward the river, I peered out the window for promising-looking manholes. A mix of nervousness and excitement gripped me as tight as a toddler clutching her blankie.

We were going to talk to a shadowkind who might have been Luna’s closest friend, as shadowkind went. If anyone would know more about her history here and what had gone on with my parents, it’d be him.

Which also meant that if he didn’t know, the trail might run totally cold.

I drummed my fingers against the top of the sofa-bench and sang to settle my nerves. “Drive it by, we’ll watch for you, don’t plead or even move.”

Ruse let out a chuckle from the driver’s seat. “Are we going to ask this elf some questions or hold him up?”

“If we let Omen do the talking, it might end up being a combination of both.”

Antic smothered a giggle where she was perched on the edge of the table.

Omen bared his teeth at me, but only a little. Progress! “You’re assuming I’m coming with you into that dank place.”

I raised my eyebrows. “You’d actually let me off the leash to handle things on my own?” I teased. “Not afraid of all the catastrophes I might cause down there?”

“You have occasionally managed to handle yourself acceptably.”

“I think you mispronounced ‘amazingly.’ Anyway, you’ll miss an excellent opportunity to show off your authority and all.”

“Perhaps I’d rather use that authority to avoid treading through sewage.” A glint lit in his eyes that was uncharacteristically playful. “I’d almost think you’re afraid to go down there by yourself, with all these attempts to badger me into coming along.”

Oh, he thought he could turn the tables on me that way, did he? I resisted the urge to stick out my tongue at him. I could be slightly more mature than that, this once.

“I won’t be alone. I’ll be accompanied by the shadowkind who think getting answers that could help us take down the Company is more important than steering clear of shit.” I patted Snap’s thigh where he was sitting next to me and Thorn’s elbow where he was standing beside the sofa at my other side. “Maybe ‘boss’ doesn’t mean the same thing it used to.”

“I’m pretty sure delegation has always been part of the job description.” He glanced toward the front of the RV as Ruse slowed to a stop. “But don’t worry, Disaster. Since you’re so keen on having my protection, I’ll sacrifice a few minutes to the stench.”

“That’s not what I was saying,” I groused—and holy heretic hounds, was that a hint of a grin from the hellhound shifter, despite our argument?

“I could hang back then,” he said as he pushed himself away from the counter across from the table. “Darlene needs protection more than you do while you’re around.”

“Oh, no.” I gave him a light shove toward the door. “You said you’d come, and you’ve got to be a man of your word. Come on. You’ll get to do so much glowering and growling. Probably mostly at me. It’ll be fun.”

He caught my hand before it’d even finished grazing his back and pushed it back toward me—not roughly, but firmly. The heat of his fingers blazed over my skin, making the banter suddenly feel electrically charged. “You won’t want to misplace this where we’re going.”

“A gentleman would offer his elbow,” I informed him.

“Good thing I’ve never pretended to be one of those, then.”

“M’lady,” Thorn said, offering me his elbow and looking as if he took the whole gentleman thing as seriously as he did most other subjects.

I smiled up at him and rose on my toes to kiss his cheek. “I already know you’re perfectly chivalrous. But you’d better stick to the shadows unless we need defending—it’s going to be hard enough getting down there without anyone asking why we’re messing around with city property.”

Ruse appeared on the steps by the door, apparently having already scoped out the area. “There’s an opening to the sewer down one of the quieter streets,” he said. “We can go through the shadows and push it up for you, and if you’re quick about it, there aren’t too many people around to notice.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

The other shadowkind vanished, except for Snap, who rested his hand on my hip with his arm around me. I tipped my head back to put my face at the perfect angle to receive a kiss, and he didn’t disappoint me.

“I’ll be fine,” I told him. “You’ll all be right there—and I’m just walking down the street.” And disappearing into a manhole of some sort, but I’d rather not dwell on that too much ahead of the stink. Slipping stealthily through the gap shouldn’t be any trouble after all my thieving practice.

“Of course you will,” Snap said with automatic confidence. “I only wondered…”

When his pause stretched on, I poked his arm. “What? You’ve wondered a lot of things, and I’m always happy to answer.”

He wet his lips with that tempting tongue. “Have you and Omen become closer? The way we are, and how you are with Ruse and Thorn?”

The memory of the hellhound shifter’s hot fingers just now—and of the moment days ago when he’d responded to my kiss—tingled through me. “Not like that,” I said. “Why?”

“It’s only—there are times when the two of you have that energy between you, for what Ruse calls mating.” The devourer looked abruptly, adorably awkward. “I wouldn’t be upset. He is… very different from me, and very powerful, and he’s doing so much for all shadowkind. I couldn’t say I’m worthy of your affection and he isn’t.”

I gave him a wry smile. “I think it’s more whether he thinks I’m worthy of his. That’s all right. The three of you are plenty to keep me occupied. And he’s a jerk at least as often as he’s tempting.”

Snap hummed. “He carries a lot of weight on his shoulders. It’s made him hard. But he’s been good to me.” He pressed a peck to the top of my head. “I’d better catch up. Hurry to meet us.”

I shut the door of the RV—currently in tour bus form—carefully behind me and made for the ridged metal surface that stood out against the asphalt just down the street. As I reached the manhole, the heavy cover lifted to show an inch of darkness and the faint gleam of Thorn’s white-blond hair.

A couple of teens were ambling down the street toward me. I gestured for the warrior to wait a moment, became fascinated by the closed storefront next to me until the teens had passed by, and then made an upward motion with my hand.

The second he’d raised the cover higher, I squeezed through the gap and found myself wrapped in Thorn’s free arm, pressed to his brawny torso. He lowered the metal disc, his body braced between the tunnel’s walls with his back and feet at opposite sides, and adjusted me against him.

“I’ll convey you down, m’lady.”

“Thank you ever so much,” I said with a grin.

It was hard to keep that good mood intact as the sewer smells closed in around me in the dimness. Only a few thin streaks of light fell from the little holes in the manhole cover. Thorn set me down on a stretch of dingy concrete, his mouth set as if he were restraining a grimace at the stench. “It is very dark from here on. The others have gone ahead to search for our elf.”

“Let’s hope they find him soon.” I had no qualms about wrinkling my nose. Breathing through my mouth to dilute the stench, I pulled out my phone and switched it to flashlight mode. I wasn’t afraid to go tramping around in these tunnels, but if I could avoid taking a wrong turn into a trench full of literal crap, I’d prefer that.

Up ahead, one of those trenches held a turgid flow of murky water. Well, water and lots of other things much less appealing than H2O. Was that the swish of a crocodile’s tail?

Better not to look too closely.

I crept along the walkway beside it, my stomach starting to churn for reasons that had nothing to do with my nerves. After what felt like a hundred and one years, a figure emerged into view up ahead: Omen, a hint of his hellhound magma glow making him stand out against the darkness. “Here he is,” he said in a dry tone that didn’t give me much idea of what to expect.

The skinny man who stepped out beside him could best be described as “sullen.” Everything about him seemed to droop, from the fall of his black hair, the bags under his eyes, and the slope of his jaw, all the way down to the floppy tongues of his miraculously spotless sneakers. True to elvish form, his ears had sharp tips aimed toward the ceiling. If we had to take this meeting out in public, maybe Ruse could give him some hat pointers.

“He says his name’s Gloam,” Ruse said, materializing just behind me. He rested his hand on my waist with the sweep of his thumb in a fond caress. “I asked to make sure, and surprisingly enough, it’s definitely not ‘Gloom’.”

I held back a snicker with a twitch of my lips. “A fae woman by the lighting store told us you were good friends with Luna.”

The elf sighed, the sound heavy with disillusionment. You’d have thought we’d just told him his house had burned down and his car exploded. Although given where he was living, maybe that had already happened.

“Luna,” he said in a dour voice. “I thought I mattered more to her than to be abandoned without a second thought. But off she went to who knows where and left me all alone.”

Antic popped out of the darkness with a tsk of her tongue. “She’s dead now, elf. So maybe it’s better you didn’t go with her, huh?” She tweaked his sagging shirt sleeve and shot me a smile as if seeking my approval of the point she’d made.

Gloam appeared so depressed already it was hard to tell whether that news affected him. “Some mortals say to die is to go to a better place. It could be that’s true.”

“Let’s hope it is,” I said, aiming to speed things along. “And she left in a rush because she thought she was about to get murdered right then by hunters who were in the process of murdering other friends of hers. I take it that you did know her pretty well?”

“We explored the human nightlife together. She said I was the only one she could talk to who wouldn’t think she was strange.” He sighed again. “Everyone thinks I’m strange. Who am I to judge anyone else? Not that it stops them.”

I wasn’t sure “strange” was the right word for the impression he gave off, but getting into a debate about it didn’t strike me as a good use of my time. “I’m sorry to hear that. You don’t happen to know about other people she was friendly with in the city, do you? Maybe a man named Philip… a human man?”

“Oh, yes,” Gloam said, as if this were common knowledge, so why was I bothering to ask him? “The human man. She talked about him. One of her daytime companions, since my company isn’t good enough then.”

His head drooped farther. How had perky Luna ever ended up friends with this dude?

Omen looked as though he were restraining himself from grabbing the elf’s shoulder and shaking the answers out of him. “What did she say about him? Did she mention anything to do with his wife?”

“That’s the only reason she knew him—his wife. Not that she was his wife to begin with. Who would have thought? But these things—sometimes it’s strange…” The elf shook his head dejectedly. “Luna made it sound like the most wonderful experience, not that I’ll ever have it.”

Antic gave him a jab in the belly with her finger. “What experience?” She made a face at me. “I think he’s trying to make us all just as miserable as he is.”

“No. No, no one should ever have to feel as I do right now.” He rubbed his mouth. “Ember was Luna’s best friend, really. How could I compete with an ifrit? And then she goes and has this romance with some human man—Luna found that so fascinating—but she stopped talking to me all that much, she got so wrapped up in helping them …”

My heart stopped. “Wait, you’re saying the guy named Philip that Luna knew—he married an ifrit? A shadowkind woman?”

“It does happen from time to time,” Gloam said, as if he couldn’t imagine any fate more tragic. Or maybe he thought the tragedy was his own lack of romance? It was difficult to tell through the general haze of melancholy. “All hush hush, of course. Luna barely let it slip even to me. Augh, maybe I shouldn’t even have told you.” He dropped his head into his hands.

My pulse started up again, but its beat kept stuttering. Naturally it was Snap, ever curious, who asked the question we must all have been thinking in that moment. He might not even have realized how ridiculous it would sound to anyone more familiar with shadowkind-human relations. He set his hand on my shoulder and leaned past me toward the elf. “Could the human man and the ifrit have had a child?”

Gloam laughed, but somehow he turned even that noise despondent. “Everyone knows shadowkind don’t produce children. But it’s funny that you ask. Luna said something once—looking up legends of when fae and the like had supposedly mingled with mortals to that extent—I suppose they might have been looking for a way. I doubt they found one, though.”

I swallowed hard, staring at him, not yet ready to look at my companions and see what they made of that revelation. No doubt rose up in me. What he’d said wasn’t definitive proof, but the pieces fit together in a way I couldn’t deny.

I bled both blood and smoke. I could hold iron and silver, and I could generate fire by will alone. I was human, and I was also shadowkind.

My parents and Luna had found a way.

There was my answer—and it was just as much a puzzle as it’d been before I’d started this quest. How could anyone tell me what being a hybrid of human and shadowkind would mean or how to handle my powers? Even this elf, who was apparently the only being still alive who’d known that secret, had dismissed it as utterly impossible.